For 2 New Shows, Fox Cuts Back on Ads

Article Source: http://adweek.com

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Net debuts ‘Remote-Free TV’ for ‘Fringe,’ ‘Dollhouse’

May 16, 2008

-By Paul J. Gough and James Hibberd, The Hollywood Reporter

LOS ANGELES Fox is shaking up the commercial TV model with “Remote-Free TV.”

At its upfront presentation Thursday, the network announced it will air two new drama series, J.J. Abrams’ Fringe and Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, with dramatically reduced commercial breaks.

“It’s a simple concept and potentially revolutionary,” Fox Entertainment chairman Peter Liguori said. “We’re going to have less commercials, less promotional time, and less reason for viewers to use the remote. We’re going to redefine the viewing experience.”

Both shows would have network commercial loads of about five minutes per hour, about half the usual. The commercial pods would also be shorter and they would have about half the promo load as well.

In an interview after the presentation, Fox Entertainment president Kevin Reilly acknowledged that “Remote-Free TV” was a risk but there needed to be a “paradigm shift” in network TV.

Cutting down commercials will make the two already pricey sci-fi series even more expensive as they have to produce longer episodes. To offset that and the reduced commercial inventory, the network is planning to charge advertisers a premium.

Ad buyers were generally upbeat about the idea, and said they liked the two shows.

“We’re always clamoring for an uncluttered environment,” said Carat Media’s Andy Donchin. But he said that he wanted to see how much of a premium would be placed on it.

Fringe and Dollhouse highlight Fox’s slate of six new series for the 2008-09 season — two dramas, three comedies and an unscripted show, the most any broadcaster presented at the upfronts.

Once again, the network will launch its fall season earlier than most competitors.

During the week of Aug. 25, Fox will air special two-hour premiere episodes of several series, including Prison Break and Fringe. Dollhouse, which only wrapped up its pilot last Friday, will launch in January.

“We have high expectations for this,” Reilly said of Fringe. A large-scale marketing campaign for the series was launched Thursday.

As for Dollhouse, Reilly said he was “confident that this will become the next tentpole series for Fox.”

ESPN, CNN, Scripps, NBC Putting Media/Marketing Integration Upfront

Article Source: http://jackmyers.com

Article Link: http://www.jackmyers.com/commentary/media-business-report/18901919.html

By Dorian Benkoil and Jack Myers

Eight months after being announced, Nielsen’s TV/Internet Convergence Panel, launched with ESPN, has gathered a large enough sample to track combined TV and digital media consumption for the sports network. The panel of some 1,000 participants is intended to correlate usage across platforms, including TV, the Internet and mobile. The initiative is just one step in networks’ attempts to sell packages to marketers based on branding and engagement that moves well beyond ratings and gross rating points. “I don’t think just impression delivery or ratings delivery is always the perfect indicator of how to move [a client’s] business, so we try to go the extra step,” ESPN EVP of multimedia sales Eric Johnson told JackMyers Media Business Report in an exclusive interview. He says about a third of ESPN’s business now is written as an opportunity for more than one medium. At yesterday’s Upfront presentation on a fabricated SportsCenter set at the Nokia Theater, ESPN executives unveiled multiple cross-platform marketing programs and immersive sports initiatives. They also announced Hannah Storm will be joining a new live weekday morning SportsCenter in August. At the same time, The Media Networks division of ESPN – parent The Walt Disney Company announced the creation of an emerging media and advertising research lab “to further explore the connection that viewers of all ages have with our entertainment, news and sports programming,” said Anne Sweeney, co-chair of Disney Media Networks.

After years of talking about cross-platform sales and the need to move beyond ratings, the mentality is taking hold. NBC Universal President and CEO Jeff Zucker proclaimed ahead of this week’s Upfront presentations that it’s not “just about the ratings anymore,” and said that NBC is working more closely with advertisers to construct packages in multiple media. Disney executives, too, have talked about the affinity their viewers have with the brand across platforms. MTV executives have been working with research organizations, including Dynamic Logic, Latitude and OTX to, like Nielsen and ESPN, try to understand how exposure to the MTV brand affects messaging across platforms. (They are also working more closely with advertisers to create co-branded content that runs between programming. JackMyers Media Business Report, May 6.) Scripps Networks has worked to engage viewers and users by creating interstitial “vignettes” that wrap advertiser-friendly content around commercial messages for products for its lifestyle channels such as the Food Network, and created complimentary content for the Web. “We’re going to have to become much better at measuring the synergistic effect of what happens when you put a campaign on television, but tie it into a direct link with a Web presence,” Mike Pardee, SVP of research at Scripps told JackMyers Media Business Report in an exclusive interview. “And you might have other tie-ins like print or outdoor or billboard.”

CNN’s sales team is pushing especially hard to extol the brand value of the channel throughout the day, whether at airports, at home or on a cellphone. “That the [broadcast] networks can say they reached this many people on this particular program on this Thursday night is an argument that was valid five years ago, not today,” CNN’s Greg D’Alba, EVP and COO of advertising sales, told JackMyers Media Business Report. D’Alba and Johnson were both quick to say they weren’t talking about simple bundling — moving repackaged TV content to the Web or onto mobile devices and wrapping those into a packaged media buy. ESPN not only puts SportsCenter on ESPN.com — a move that despite initial fears has been additive of audience rather than cutting into TV viewing, Johnson says — but also creates original Web, mobile and digital on-demand programming. CNN has run separate live video programming on the Web and TV for the major Democratic primaries. It’s crucial, says D’Alba, to provide “real utility content that comes in the form of news and or information like a CNN or sports where viewers or consumers are emotionally attached to their specific brand and their content that the message is perceived in a better way and reaching consumers where creative will stand out.”

In a challenged Upfront environment where media buyers are again bristling over perceived increased rates for decreased audience, the sellers are trying to be more creative about explaining the worth of the buys. If the ESPN-Nielsen initiative bears fruit, it will be one of the first sets of quantitative data about media usage of a single media brand across a multiplicity of platforms. They hope to use the panel to tell not only more about the number of people who use the different media, but also their demographic information and whether different markets have different multi-media behaviors. (The initiative is different from Nielsen’s announced Data Fusion service, which combines viewership information from a TV panel of 30,000 and an Internet panel of 27,000.) While Johnson acknowledges that the “bread and butter” for ESPN is still TV buys for clients trying to reach the ESPN audience, he and D’Alba know they and their clients are going to have to follow the consumer’s usage patterns. “At the end of the day you got to figure out how to capture the media consumer’s media consumption and behavioral habits on a 24-hour basis, which is quickly the way people are starting to consume media,” D’Alba says. “They want to define their own prime time.”

To communicate with or to be contacted by the executives and/or companies mentioned in this column, email the JackMyers Connection Hotline.

Dorian Benkoil is a regular contributor to JackMyers Media Business Report.

‘Upfronts’ Go Low Key

Article Source: http://wsj.com

Television

By REBECCA DANA
May 10, 2008; Page A2

During this strike-wounded TV season, some television executives consoled themselves by saying that the turmoil might at least prompt changes in one of the industry’s more cumbersome traditions: the annual “upfront” presentations to advertisers. In a world of year-round program introductions and digital video recorders, these expensive pep rallies to trumpet the “fall season” seemed old-fashioned.

Associated Press

Patrick Dempsey and Ellen Pompeo, from left, with ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy” react to a reporter’s question during ABC’s 2006 Winter Press Tour.

No such luck. This year they need upfront razzle-dazzle more than ever.

Two weeks into the May “sweeps” period, when the networks trot out their best attention-grabbing programming and audiences are usually among the largest of the year, ratings for the broadcasters are down about 20% from last year, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Spooked advertisers will be looking for a sign from network executives that autumn will bring the return of those viewers who defected to cable and the Internet during this winter’s crippling 100-day Hollywood writers’ strike. They will want further assurances that a possible actors’ strike this summer won’t disrupt next season as this one was.

The strike delayed by several weeks the traditional spring development period, where networks and studios decide which veteran series to pick up for another year and order pilots for new shows. Consequently, the networks will have few polished pilots to show advertisers.

Instead, the networks have prepared an array of low-key presentations, combining scant video clips with plenty of evocative descriptions of the shows yet to come.

Executives will emphasize the past year’s efforts to dramatically expand broadcast television’s presence on the Web, whether with home sites such as Walt Disney Co.’s ABC.com, or other video-streaming sites, including Hulu.com, a joint venture between News Corp.‘s Fox and General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal.

Networks will also try to allay advertisers’ fears about digital video recording devices, which allow viewers to record programs and fast-forward through commercials. Part of that effort means working more branded products into actual story lines of shows. According to a Nielsen survey released last week, product placements on broadcast network shows rose 39% in the first quarter of 2008, compared with the same period last year.

In lieu of an “upfront,” NBC at first hoped to get away with a series of “infront” presentations in April. But in the end, NBC opted not to forgo an upfront-week presentation: The company will host an “experience,” walking would-be advertisers through a life-size diorama of NBC Universal’s multiplatform programming plans for the next 15 months.

CBS Corp.’s CBS and ABC have both canceled their once-lavish after-parties, opting for lower-key events. ABC’s presentation, which in past years included song-and-dance numbers featuring both senior network management and talent, will instead have only two executives on stage, conversing in adjacent armchairs.

Write to Rebecca Dana at rebecca.dana@wsj.com

Scatter, Economy, C3 Among Factors That Will Influence Madison Avenue’s Annual Bazaar

Article Source: http://multichannel.com

By Linda Haugsted — Multichannel News, 5/3/2008 5:28:00 AM

Cable-network ad-sales executives are bullish about the current selling season. They predict strong revenue growth in spite of national economic woes and due in part to soft ratings for their broadcast-network competitors.

But some ad-agency executives say the prevailing sentiment of the upfront period may be better characterized as “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

“The situation will come down to the very last minute,” said Horizon Media executive vice president and chief media negotiations officer Aaron Cohen. Agencies are taking a very cautious approach, he said and it’s not “crystal clear that [dollars] will be committed in the levels of last year.”

The wild and woolly ad-sales “scatter” market, in which ads are sold on a spot basis, heartened ad executives with double-digit rate increases in fourth-quarter 2007 and the first quarter of this year. But Cohen said sales growth is slowing at the moment.

FAVORABLE FACTORS
Yet network ad executives cite factors they believe favor strong ad sales in the upfront season, in which media buyers purchase ads for a full season of programming. Last fall’s weak broadcast-network entertainment schedule led viewers to sample new (or new to them) fare on cable networks. That trend came in advance of the Writers Guild of America strike, which further weakened broadcast dominance.

Cable has also steadily been adding buzzworthy originals to its lineups, such as AMC’s Mad Men and FX’s Damages, network sales executives said. And unlike the broadcast networks, new fare debuts throughout the year, they noted.

Such executives as FX senior vice president of sales Michael Brochstein and Hallmark Channel executive vice president of ad sales Bill Abbott aren’t the only ones predicting ad-sales revenue growth. The annual spending report from Jack Myers Media Business Report predicts national cable sales will increase by 7% for 2008, attracting an estimated $18.9 billion.

By contrast, broadcast ad spending is expected to increase 3.2% to $19.5 billion. The forecaster predicts broadcast market share will decline from the current 8.2% of the national advertising pie to 7.9%. But according to Myers, cable is not picking up share from broadcast: Cable’s market share is predicted to remain at its 2007 level of 7.7%.

TNS Media Intelligence is more conservative in its projections for this year. That market-research firm predicts cable’s national ad sales growth rate at 5%, with broadcast-network growth at 2.7%.

Ad experts, such as Discovery Networks U.S. ad president Joe Abruzzese, said that in general, the upfront auction generates about 80% of the ad sales for the year for broadcasters and about 50% to 60% of cable’s yearly ad sales.

A year ago, Merrill Lynch projected 2007-08 broadcast primetime upfront spending to grow 3% to some $8.7 billion and cable to grow 3% to $7.53 billion.

The overall 2008 projections are in spite of the fact that 2007’s biggest spending sector, financial services, is reeling from the home-foreclosure crisis and other signs of a recession. Some of the growth this year predicted by analysts is based on 2008-only factors, such as political- and Olympics-related ad buying.

But buyers and network execs alike said a recession doesn’t necessarily mean that ad money will dry up completely.

“In tough economic times, advertisers gravitate to what works for them, and that’s television,” said Carat USA director of national broadcast Andy Donchin. “If you cut back, and the competition doesn’t, you lose your voice.”

Advertisers may be more conservative in their spending or shift from sales-focused commercials to branding or other tactics, buyers said.

“I’ve yet to meet an agency saying, ‘Budgets are through the roof!’ But we’re still feeling pretty good,” said FX’s Brochstein. Good programming draws advertisers, he said.

“Cadillac sponsored the premiere of Damages. They weren’t on our network before,” he said. That drama series, which stars Glenn Close, has been picked up by FX for a second season.

Quality originals draw viewers, and positive feedback to advertisers, Discovery’s Abruzzese added. Bank of America actually got letters from viewers of the Emmy- and Peabody-winning Planet Earth, thanking it for bringing the HD miniseries to viewers, he said.

BACKHAND ‘COMPLEMENT’?
Despite the positive spin by cable execs, buyers said clients don’t look at cable as a broadcast primetime replacement but as a “primetime complement,” according to one buyer who asked not be quoted by name.

But cable could benefit if broadcasters misplay their hand.

“[Advertisers] are still heavily invested in the [broadcasters], but if they are too aggressive in rate inflation, buys could flow to cable, and they’d see more money,” said Donchin.

Cable-network executives noted the efforts they’ve made to make themselves more attractive to advertisers, including offering multiplatform deals, product integration and experiments in how a commercial pod is presented.

The latter was a necessity after last year’s adoption of so-called C3 ratings, which measure viewership when a program debuts, as well as during the subsequent three days of viewing on video-on-demand platforms and digital video recorders. C3 drills down into commercial-minute ratings, so advertisers can compare which networks fare better or worse at retaining audience through commercial breaks.

C3 was a boon for some networks such as Hallmark Channel, with an older demographic less prone to surfing away when commercials come on, which is hurtful to other networks. (See related chart.)

Abruzzese said C3 caused a 7% to 8% drop of in costs per thousand (CPMs) for Discovery Networks.

Executives from competing networks named MTV Networks as the biggest victim of C3 falloff. But the programmer’s president of advertising sales, Hank Close, said the networks have altered their advertising methodology to mitigate any losses due to C3 measurement.

MTVN delayed adoption of C3 because the company felt its adoption was “ill-timed,” he said. Once the cable group adopted C3 measurement, it negotiated higher CPMs that accounted for the C3 audience loss during breaks, he said.

MTV Networks and other cable programmers have also stemmed audience loss during commercial pods by experimenting with new ways to present ads. Close said strategies have included a 13-mobisode series for T-Mobile, which extended that advertiser’s brand to a new platform, among other digital initiatives. On-air, MTV Networks shifted from two commercial pods per hour to three. Spots in those shorter breaks were designed to “marry an advertiser’s brand equity” to the character of the network on which the ad runs.

Such strategies have contributed to a 3% improvement in viewership to VH1 commercial pods, for instance, he said.

Turner Broadcasting System has also been experimenting with “pod-busters,” strategies to retain viewers in the commercial breaks. One method is “bit-coms,” a mini sketch comedy created around a product and designed to look more like entertainment.

His networks have also experimented with where conventional ads get placed in theatrical films they air, to see if first-hour pods get better retention than ads that run later; and with the placement of “funny pods,” which urge viewers to stick around to get the joke.

These strategies have played out across cable networks in response to the new focus on C3 measurements of commercial viewers. It shouldn’t have taken that change to happen, Cohen grumbled.

“Damn it, this was stuff they should have been doing all along,” he said.

TURNER STEPS UP
Turner is sufficiently confident in the ratings performance of its suite of networks (TNT, TBS, TruTV) that the group is doing its upfront presentation May 14, the same week as the broadcasters.

“Let [buyers] make decisions, then and there, on an equal-plain basis. The implied message is we have the content … we are a substitute for broadcast,” said Levy.

Comcast Networks, which includes E!, has also added a third commercial pod and shifted national advertisers into the first position in commercial breaks as a response to the C3 ratings. Advertisers are teased within a show, such as a “Dress My Mess” minisode teased within an episode of Clean House, said Comcast Network Advertising Sales president David Cassaro. The networks are creating more pod-buster content for advertisers using an in-house production unit, and saving pods for advertising, not promotions. Crawls and pop-ups during shows are used to promote upcoming content, he said.

Though C3 has provided a more accurate picture of actual commercial viewing, executives predict its use to be short-lived, as networks criticize it as placing too much onus on networks, rather than advertisers, for the performance of a pod.

“We deliver a number of viewers into a break, but if they are met with bad copy, or over-used copy and the viewers turn away, that’s our cost now,” noted A&E Television Networks senior vice president of national ad sales Mel Berning. “I think it’s right to focus some of the responsibility back to the creative community. It’s not just the network putting something on the air.”

Craig Woerz, co-founder and managing partner for MediaStorm, an agency that specializes in placing ads for entertainment brands such as those of movie studios or their individual releases, agreed with Berning.

“There’s too much run-of-the-mill creative out there. We need more integrated ad opportunities out there,” he said, suggesting that show talent be utilized, “not a full-fledged endorsement, but some integration.”

But union pacts with talent can complicate such deals. Actors have already asked for possible compensation for revenue they’ve earned through product integration in shows in which they perform.

Woerz is an enthusiastic backer of what he termed the “stellar” opportunities in cable, though he called this one of the most “complicated media planning seasons ever for us.” His agency, which plans campaigns for theatrical releases, for instance, looks for advertising partners with as many opportunities to integrate ads into programs and platforms as possible.

An “unsung hero,” in his opinion, is the growing base of viewers of free on-demand programming. That viewing, he said, represents ‘pure engagement.” Clients are doing some buys of ads on free on-demand shows without also buying ads on the scheduled airing of the program.

BEYOND C3
Some buyers are already moving beyond C3 and want a minute-by-minute or 30-second-by-30-second measurement system to be developed.

“We weren’t satisfied with C3 from the beginning,” said Starcom MediaVest Group senior vice president and cable activation director Natalie Conway. That agency pinned 16 of its ad buying deals to minute-by-minute measurements in 2007. She said this year, 25% of the agency’s cable investment would have “exact minute guarantees,” with a couple of pacts including second-by-second deals.

Starcom MediaVest has been one of the most aggressive agencies in promoting more intense media monitoring of ad performance. For instance, in April it agreed to participate in a program that will begin in the third quarter and will collect second-by-second viewership data from 100,000 DirecTV set-top boxes.

While more precise data collection is desirable, not everyone in the ad community thinks it will be quick in coming on a commercially practical basis.

“Second-by-second is a long way away,” predicted Cohen. First the technology has to be developed, and then the data must be able to be delivered to third parties for network analysis, he explained.

“If no one has an easy system for us to analyze, well, it won’t happen next year,” he said.

But “any medium that can improve accountability will be welcomed,” added Donchin.

C3 Retention Rankers The top 10 and bottom (of 49) networks in “retention,” or average commercial minute rating compared with average program minute rating, in primetime in Q1 2008. RANK	PROGRAMMER	RETENTION RATE
1	Nick at Nite	95.2%
2	Hallmark Channel	94.9%
3	TV Land	93.0%
4	HGTV	92.9%
5	USA Network	92.4%
6	The Weather Channel	92.3%
7	Fox News Channel	92.2%
8	CBS	92.2%
9	Tru TV	92.0%
10	Fox (broadcast network)	92.0%
…
45	TV Guide Network	84.6%
46	VH1	84.5%
47	CNBC	84.4%
48	E!	84.2%
49	MTV	83.8%
Source: Hallmark Channel/Nielsen NPower Ratings Analysis

Nick Crows About Multiple Screens at Upfront Preso

Source: http://clickz.com

By Enid Burns, The ClickZ Network, Mar 14, 2008

Nickelodeon presented its new and returning properties on multiple screens at its upfront presentation yesterday morning. Cross-platform programming was the theme conveyed to a theater full of advertisers and media buyers.

All of the network’s programming going forward will be created not just for the TV, but for the Web and other channels, according to Jim Perry, EVP of 360 Brand Sales at Nickelodeon/MTV Kids and Family Group. “We no longer look to create ideas across our television shows, but they live across platform,” he said.

Among the new properties built for TV and the Web are an environment driven show and online experience, “The Big Green Help,” and an interactive dance show, “Dance on Sunset.” The Big Green Help” to play a SpongeBob-themed eco-game on the site. In November a multiplayer game will be added with objectives like lowering the levels of CO2 on a virtual Earth.

The environment is among kids’ top concerns these days, said Judy McGrath, chairman and CEO of MTV Networks, citing a study conducted in collaboration with Pew Center on Global Climate Change, “Keeping It Cool: Kids, Parents and the Global Environment.” Based on that finding, Nick has billed the program as a multi-screen environmental campaign meant to empower kids.

“The Big Green Help” will begin in the U.S. and spread to other countries where Nickelodeon has broadcast channels, starting with the U.K., Germany, Korea, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.

The network will also premier “Dance on Sunset,” a half hour series focused on free-style dance competitions, a venue for kids to learn new moves and see celebrities dance. “Sunset” features a Web component where viewers can learn and practice “fresh squeezed” dance moves from the show and get exclusive Web content, upload their own dance videos, and view highlights from guest performances. The “Dance On Sunset” Web site will also feature weekly blogs, questions, comments, polls, and games.

“This is a new format for us, I think it will skew a little older,” said Perry. “That’s the one thing you’ll start to see with our brand, and also with the advertisers you’ll see with our brand, the entire family unit together.”

A returning show, and one that broke ground for living on the Web and TV simultaneously, is “iCarly.” The audience participates through the Web by chatting, commenting, and uploading videos of stunts and tricks. Many of those videos are then played on the television show. The success of “iCarly” has paved the way for development of additional shows with crossover potential, executives said.

“What you’ve seen in the last year, convergence with other screens, is very appealing, not only with audiences but with marketers. The audience is more engaged… experiencing it in different ways,” said Perry.